Saturday, April 09, 2016

Kelsey Cascade Rose Juliana v. United States of America

The April 8, 2016 ruling by U.S.
District Court Judge Thomas Coffin -- in Eugene, Oregon -- that 21
plaintiffs, ages 8-19, are entitled to be heard in their claim that the
federal government has violated their constitutional rights by
permitting, encouraging, and otherwise enabling continued exploitation,
production and combustion of fossil fuels is unprecedented. As Judge
Coffin wrote in his order denying the government's motion to dismiss:

The debate about climate change and its impact has been before various
political bodies for some time now. Plaintiffs give this debate
judiciability by asserting harms that befall or will befall them
personally and to a greater extent than older segments of society. It
may be that eventually the alleged harms, assuming the correctness of
plaintiffs' analysis of the impacts of global climate change, will
befall all of us. But the intractability of the debates before Congress
and state legislatures and the alleged valuing of short term economic
interest despite the cost to human life, necessitates a need for the
courts to evaluate the constitutional parameters of the action or
inaction taken by the government. This is especially true when such
harms have an alleged disparate impact on a discrete class of society.

While the federal government denied any duty under the constitution to
protect essential natural resources for the benefit of all present and
future generations, the Court's decision upheld the plaintiffs' claims
regarding the government "denying them protections afforded to previous
generations and by favoring short term economic interests of certain
citizens." The next step is a review of Judge Coffin's decision by
another judge in the same court, Judge Ann Aiken.

As political theater designed to dramatize the conflict between Wall
Street and main street, it is worth watching the public response to this
decision. While it is unlikely to prevail in the federal courts,
assuming it ever goes to trial, it is an important clarification of the
power imbalance in American society, and a timely reminder that the
rigged electoral system -- now frustrating US citizenry -- must be
changed as a matter of human survival.

While it is a noble gesture of citizenship on the part of the
plaintiffs, it is unfortunate that their legal counsel have chosen to
promote icons of the non-profit industrial complex, i.e. 350, Bill
McKibben and Naomi Klein -- all of whom are financed by the fossil fuel
industry -- in their press release. As noted in Charms of Naomi: The Mystique of Mass Hypnosis,
this social engineering by Wall Street has hijacked the energy of
American youth, in order to prevent the effective political organizing
required to combat the exorbitant power of the fossil fuel industry.